The Training Grant in Academic Nutrition brings together the intellectual and physical resources of the Harvard School of Public Health, and Harvard Medical School, fostering close interactions between trainees and faculty, including 23 preceptors and 6 resource faculty distributed between these two institutions. The Principal Investigator, Dr. Walter Willett, and Co-Principal Investigator, Dr. W. Allan Walker, have established a strong and vigorous pre- and post-doctoral program that we are now seeking to expand. The Training Program has successfully recruited an outstanding cadre of applicants, many MD and post-graduate students, who demonstrate intellectual promise and dedicated commitment to nutritional science research. Those candidates accepted into our program receive training in three key areas of contemporary nutrition: Nutritional Biochemistry, Human/Clinical Nutrition, and Nutritional Epidemiology. Our overall goal is to incorporate concepts, approaches, and scientific tools from both basic and applied science so that trainees are able to transcend conventional specialty boundaries to face the challenges of nutritional sciences in the 21st century. This Training Program is designed both for individuals who have recently completed their undergraduate degree, entering a formal doctoral program, and for physicians and graduates of other doctoral programs who will enter an intensive research training program with options to obtain formal degrees. The degrees offered are the PhD or research training program with options to obtain formal degrees. The degrees offered are the PhD or DSc in Nutritional Biochemistry and the DSc in Nutritional Epidemiology. For MD fellows, we offer a unique Masters Program in Clinical Effectiveness for training in clinical investigation based on direct studies with human subjects. Regardless of track, all students must successfully completed didactic coursework involving both basic biochemical and molecular concepts and advanced training in quantitative sciences, including epidemiology and biostatistics. This plan of study is bolstered by substantial elective coursework in area of human/clinical nutrition. All of these efforts to integrate modern molecular science and contemporary epidemiology are reinforced through demanding "hands-on" popular-guided nutritional science research with scientists who are at the "cutting edge" of their research.